Out of All the Lost Causes
by Night Strider
Summary: Love is an easy thing to do without, for some of us anyway. RuMitRu. One shot.


Out of All the Lost Causes

Disclaimer: I don't own SD boys, Inoue does. The events that follow are not included in the original plot but enjoy anyway.

Summary: Love is an easy thing to do without, for some of us anyway. RuMitRu. One shot.

Note: I haven't written anything this year, which is something I just recently realized. I have no idea whatsoever what this shit is all about; it could be a love story, a philosophical angst or simply something conjured on a whim. It could be anything your wicked heart desires, and for all that, it could possibly not constitute a single sense. To those uninitiated, it's actually something I officially and regularly do where fan fictions are concerned: not making any sense. I've been trying to sound literary all these years and feedbacks such as "you suck" or "I liked it" are probably all the satisfaction I could get. Perhaps times haven't changed around here. Oh well.

* * *

The faces he saw were luminous, more than bright and less than recognizable, fat, creased, young, and beautiful; never had such a strange set of combinations ever graced the world he lived in, at least not within thirty yards of his radius. No matter how different a face was from the one next to it, they all seemed to project that loving, annoying, unknowing happiness. A happiness that did not seem directed to anyone in particular, despite the number of times the rest of them expressed their joy for him and his bride. All in one nearly eventful day. Above everything, their whiteness appalled him; the very serenity with which they handled this pivotal moment didn't serve his heart to delay just one merciful beat.

"Congratulations, Mitsui-san. I don't suppose you'll find a happier day." They would say or utter something along the same line. He would just smile or if he felt any differently, he would perfunctorily reply, "not a happier man either."

The crowd closed in. No blinding lights, no glorious laughter, no solemn prayers. It wasn't a championship game where the ceremony was much more intimately familiar to him, much more predictable, much more shared. It didn't take much for him to realize that it was a proceeding that would entail a far heavier responsibility, nothing less than the rest of his future, the rest of his time afterward, the rest of his life. The silence descended almost to his horror, the smell of lavender lingered in the air, seeming to use up his oxygen. He fancied he was being strangled just in time to realize that it was his wedding day, that for this reason, these people, everyone he loved and cared about, were gathered there to witness his most glorious victory, yet.

"Do you, Mitsui Hisashi, vow to love this woman in sickness and in health, for better or worse, in life through eternity?"

The world found him speechless, there on the bareness of the pulpit he stood on. He was beside himself with happiness.

"I do."

Then a scene commenced, one which more closely resembled a fiction. Something theatrical in the very laughter of his guests was about to catch his attention when a hand grabbed his and pulled him to a warm embrace. He had no idea who it was but it seemed now that everyone started to follow suit until he sank deeper and deeper into unrecognized warmth, everyone sharing his joy but not exactly out-leveling it. Suddenly they danced around him, gyrating after a merry tune, of which he and his beloved were the center. The disturbing whiteness disappeared to be replaced by much louder hues, the moment's visual schizophrenia almost striking him as funny. The dance floor shifted from one shade to another, in rapid succession, that he couldn't quite remember what it originally looked like. Spotlights once again. Deafening cheers like way back when, when he would drain a slick long range shot after another at the most crucial minutes.

This was what he lived for all along.

Dusk was at its end. His attention was drawn to the space outside whose utter detachment failed to escape him. Just yesterday his world precisely duplicated this atmosphere. He began walking toward it and the night, for all its youth, seemed to age by the second. Mitsui stood alone, he thought, maybe for the last time.

A man came into view. The evening reached its full maturity at his entrance, Mitsui remarked, and with the vagueness of the light around them, at first, his clothes seemed white; only when he ambled closer to Mitsui, close enough to hear his breathing, that it dawned on the latter that the man was dressed in gray.

"Rukawa."

"Mitsui." His voice was deeper, his tone punctuated by that old abrupt, only too familiar silence. But his face remained as it was thirteen years ago; pale, grave, beautiful and undeserving.

Mitsui's smile stopped some way short as it started gliding toward shock. A smile would be the most inappropriate expression; another move might as well be an indication of his resurging heartbreak. Strapped between two impossible choices, Mitsui did not dare breathe a sound, leave aside strain his eyes further. The single word Rukawa uttered in what seemed like hindsight was enough to confirm that he had indeed returned.

"I was in San Diego when the news reached me." Rukawa went on and the calmness he assumed upon saying this bore no sense of proportion to the situation. The moonlight settled between them, all one foot of naked distance, intensified by their subsequent silence.

"Is anyone in your family ill, Rukawa?" Mitsui managed to say, with an apparent effort to signify an air of formality. He presumed, or hoped, that Rukawa's return could only be justified by anything as serious as a family member on his deathbed.

"I came here precisely for the reason that you got married." Rukawa said in his trademark straightforward manner of stating an awkward fact.

Mitsui laughed. It was hard to tell the motivation behind it, but it was the sort of laugh that he often used in frustration and in his frequent sarcastic mode. "Why?"

"I don't know." Rukawa said, his meaning unanticipated. "I reckon we have nothing more to say to one another, nothing more to do with each other now that this happened…"

"I should think so too. You need not wonder why I didn't send you an invitation." Mitsui said coldly to match the dropping temperature.

"But I came anyway, perhaps for closure, for my peace of mind, which I obviously haven't had since the day—"

"That you left?" Mitsui grinned bitterly as he finished Rukawa's sentence for him. It had been so long ago since he last felt any semblance of anger toward Rukawa. He had succeeded to keep up the pretense of his indifference in the first few years up to the point that it had become quite the real premise, but painfully gradually.

"I left in order to know how far I could go." Rukawa replied. He dug his ungloved hands deeper into his pockets, a habit he'd owned way back in his high school years.

"In other words, to feed the superego. Fair enough. Why don't we call this a night?" Mitsui started to wheel around on his way back to the celebration, which oddly seemed miles away from where he and Rukawa were.

"Mitsui, whatever you might want to think after all these years, I meant to come back."

"You had thirteen years to fulfill that intention. Maybe we waited, maybe we let go; whatever it was worth, the fact remains that you did not come back, not for us or for anything that might've mattered to you. Shohoku, for instance." Mitsui snapped and at the sight of Rukawa's tendering expression, continued, "Don't bother with apologies, they're always overdue anyway."

It was Rukawa's turn to resort to irony. There was quick shift in the look on his face. "I wasn't about to say I'm sorry. After all, sempai, I'm not the one who lost faith."

"So it's the blame game now, isn't it? I'm sorry for Shohoku's decline but that was the farthest I could go or do. Hard it was to admit it, but they just slipped down the gutter the moment you decided to prove how selfish you are. You had no idea how devastating it was for Anzai-sensei, Rukawa, not a pathetic notion at all. He's in there now, maybe you could begin by saying you're sorry."

Rukawa held his silence in what seemed like hours. He was long past reasoning with Mitsui, long past the hope of ever making him realize how hard it had been for him. If it came down to who really took the brunt of those thirteen painful years, Rukawa would've had no hesitation in admitting that he did. The night was dark, but the prospect of tying things up with this person in his past certainly seemed darker.

"You're the one who fell out of love. How does that make me the one to blame?" he said at long last.

Mitsui stared at him, not wanting to acknowledge the renewed issue of their separation a long, long time ago. He had begun detaching himself from his old self longer ago than he could remember, that paradoxically young self about whom he didn't know anymore what to feel, and so he decided to forget. A large part of what made up that identity was the person standing before him now, Rukawa Kaede.

"I was young, Rukawa. Mistakes were the only thing I was good at. If it caused you so much pain, I'm sorry. But you need not take it that far, as far as leaving… this, all this behind."

"Young is what you think you were; in love was what I was." Rukawa muttered, and for the first time in many years, it dawned on Mitsui that he was seeing a side of Rukawa that he rarely knew, that one whose depth was unimaginable, unsurpassed as far as he could tell. He almost shivered at the thought of his admiration.

"Maybe that's what it all was to you," Rukawa went on. "maybe there's no point to coming back just to see you, especially when I myself can't say why I even bothered. What I know is that, this is the end of you and me. Finally. You ended it thirteen years ago but I didn't. It wasn't enough that you fell out of love or even that thirteen years have gone by, they weren't enough for me. Then you decided to pledge yourself to another, to forever. I guess that pretty much settles it." Rukawa finished and laughed bitterly.

Mitsui hadn't found his voice up to that moment when the wind seemed to have concentrated itself into where they stood and even his happiness for all the days and years to come seemed to die there and then, without a single fight. He thought of those days when he and Rukawa would sacrifice joy found elsewhere in the name of being together, if only for a few hours; he shared Rukawa's happiness but not the consequences, not the heartbreak or the regrets. And in that regard, he never quite did right by him. He wasn't fair.

It started to rain; first in drizzles, then in huge drops which overcame the silence that a while ago just seemed so noteworthy. From afar, Mitsui could hear his guests shrieking, hysterical in their search for shelter. Distinctly, he heard his wife calling for him.

"Go now." Rukawa told him in an unexpectedly urgent tone. "She needs you more than anyone from here on out."

Those were his words, cruel in their finality and succinct in their execution. Yes, those were his only words, the last ones Mitsui would ever hear from him and they both knew it too well.

"You're right." Mitsui succumbed as he recognized a faint nod from Rukawa, which signaled agreement as far as both were aware.

Rukawa walked away just then, having no other recourse but to let go. The darkness strengthened along with the rain. A deluge of feelings, rational and not, started sweeping all over Mitsui. Right before he knew it, tears were falling in earnest, almost gloriously. And to Mitsui these tears seemed too trifle compared with the sadness which seemed to singlehandedly dominate everything else he bore within. Endings were never really something he treated as something worthy of preparation or anticipation in the least, and goodbyes weren't really something he had mastered much as he tried to dodge them.

To love Rukawa all along, in absence or in proximity, was his curse, his reason and his way of living in the ultimate term. Hence, to regain the pain he caused him would be his only atonement.

"You gave me joy; it's yours to take, Kaede… my Kaede."

END


End file.
